The Libertarian Right’s Fringe Problem

Why is it so hard for Greg Brannon and other "liberty" candidates to avoid plagiarism and conspiracy theories?

Self-described constitutional conservatives are once again in vogue inside the Republican Party, but Greg Brannon is a bit of a rarity. First, his fidelity to the founding document applies to civil liberties as well as domestic programs. Second, his is a theoretically winnable race.

An obstetrician like Ron Paul and Tom Coburn, Brannon is running for Senate in North Carolina. He is the main Tea Party candidate seeking the nomination of the party that made Jesse Helms a five-term senator. Given incumbent Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan’s lackluster numbers and the overall political climate, anything is possible.

Brannon’s medical background enhances his case against both Obamacare and abortion. But what makes him stand out in a field where pro-life and anti-Obamacare stands are almost obligatory are his departures from the Bush Doctrine in a Southern state. “I believe that policies such as the indefinite detention of U.S. Citizens, executive kill lists, and warrantless wiretapping are un-American,” he says on his campaign website.

Unfortunately, Brannon has also stumbled into some of the pitfalls that have undone past “liberty” candidates. He—or more likely, his campaign staff—has been sloppy. Parts of his campaign site and position papers appear to have been plagiarized from Rand Paul (who has endorsed him) and Justin Amash.

As J. Arthur Bloom observes, “plagiarizing —even plagiarizing an ally—is self-defeating, and these incidents speak to a broader difficulty for libertarian Republicans as they attempt to make their case to the mainstream.” Bloom suggests they should “write their own damn copy.”

Brannon has also been dogged by a five-figure civil settlement with former business partners, stemming from a fizzled start-up company. In today’s economy, voters might be more understanding of entrepreneurial messiness. They may even find it endearing compared to the depredations of career politicians. But Brannon was found to have given misleading information to investors.

Most damning is Brannon’s solicitousness towards 9/11 truthers in a 2012 radio interview, even after the host tried to rescue him. Nothing in Brannon’s answer can be construed as an actual endorsement of core truther claims. It was mostly just mumbo-jumbo about the 9/11 Commission. But it was clear that he didn’t want to offend the caller by distancing himself from crazed conspiracy theories, even though he wasn’t running for office yet.

The interview was made public by Mother Jones, a magazine with little sympathy for Brannon’s conservative politics. But Mother Jones has covered Brannon’s fellow North Carolina conservative Walter Jones fairly.

Truthers are small in number, but the damage they do to the liberty movement is substantial. They prevent antiwar and civil libertarian arguments from getting a fair hearing on the right and center. And they cover otherwise serious forms of libertarianism and conservatism with a whiff of fringe nuttiness. Whatever all-caps YouTube comments and Facebook likes a candidate loses in taking a stand designed to make these people go away, it is well worth it.

Some generally sensible conservatives and libertarians will protest that while 9/11 trutherism may be bizarre, it is harmless compared to, say, having a war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Whatever else can be said of this view, it is shortsighted. Like the worst excesses of the counterculture during the Vietnam War, when peace movements marginalize themselves in this way, they might as well start making pro-war arguments.

Now back to Brannon. The cumulative effect of all this, based on the limited public polling that exists, is that establishment candidate Thom Tillis may be opening up a lead that puts him within striking distance of the 40 percent required to avoid a runoff. If Brannon can make the runoff and beat Tillis, like Ted Cruz did to David Dewhurst in Texas in 2012, the controversies could hurt his generally slim lead over Hagan.

This isn’t exactly Helms’s North Carolina. The Research Triangle has grown. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and Mitt Romney didn’t win it by a big margin four years later. And it’s worth noting that Helms himself only exceeded 54 percent of the vote statewide once—in 1972, during his first Senate campaign, when Richard Nixon was crushing George McGovern.

The North Carolina Senate race is far from over, but much will need to happen to keep it from being added to the growing list of conservative disappointments. The Republican liberty movement particularly needs candidates like Greg Brannon to win in order to take the next step.

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29 Responses to The Libertarian Right’s Fringe Problem

In my experience, a great many libertarians of the nutbag type (and a great many traditional Catholics of the nutbag type as well) genuinely think that plagiarism is okay, indeed that it is actively laudable. Their loathing of Intellectual Property – or what they prefer to call “so-called Intellectual Property” – makes them suckers for any con-artist who wants to spin them a line about how they have an inalienable right, nay a duty, to steal as much as they like from others.

I have no idea whether Greg Brannon’s office was infiltrated by loons of this specific sort. But it would not surprise me for a moment if such an infiltration had occurred.

Any b**tard who plagiarizes from me once won’t be allowed to do it twice.

Can’t recall TAC going through this sort of analysis. High time for it, though. The problem with third parties and alternative candidates is the opportunity for grifters to try and make hay out of conspiracy inclined voters. Until more people call out these idiots, the Establishment can rest easy and continue destructive foreign and domestic policies.

In North Carolina Brannon is not on the fringe. All of the leading Republican candidates want to repeal the ACA,
deny climate change, get rid of all manner of federal agencies and so on. From where I sit here in NC Dr. Brannon appears to be a main stream Republican.

Isn’t it great contradicition that the protected license profession in the USA, doctors, are the most pro-market, libertarian candidates? Maybe we simply need to let more doctors from India to compete in this space in the US.

I’ve been a Rothbard-Szasz libertarian for 35 years. The quality and integrity of libertarianism has declined in proportion to its increase in popularity. It has attracted a considerable following, especially among the young, that shows no evidence of reading anything beyond one of Ron Paul’s ghostwritten books.

Pretty sure all the leading Republicans don’t want to do all of the things you suggested. Tillis, for example, has said that “Obamacare is a great idea that can’t be paid for.” He has also said that if global warming is real, Washington has to “do something” about it. And do all the rest of the candidates really want to get rid of ALL federal agencies?

I am so sick and tired of right wing nuts such as Brannon that I almost wish that their policies become enacted. The resulting economic collapse would be equal to that of the Great Depression, particularly in Red States whose economies are dependent upon Federal spending.

I took my daughters to a rally that FreedomWorks put on for Dr. Brannon this weekend. There was a lot of “red meat” thrown to the crowd by many of the speakers (Obamacare, Hagan/Tills, 3-letter agencies). Dr. Brannon did not disappoint with his appeal to the founding documents of our country and a return to fiscal and personal responsibility.

I even made a “scavenger hunt” for my kids to find things like pocket constitutions, Matt Kibbe’s new book and to listen for terms such as “Thomas Jefferson”, “Foreign Policy”, “Austrian Economics”, etc. It was lots of fun for all of us.

Libertarians were once not mainstream, and views that aren’t mainstream will attract, besides people who may be sensible and rational, people who feel excluded and paranoid about the exclusion. Its not complicated. It doesn’t only happen among libertarians, but also socialists, who think big money is conspiring against them.

But that isn’t to say every ideological group doesn’t have its strange beliefs of its own, it just may be less conspicuous or taken mores seriously than it should. Many people on the left believe all sorts of nonsense about ‘white privilege’ for example, casually talk as if all Republicans were racist, and talk as if lack of gay marriage was a conspiracy against gay people. These aren’t “conspiracy theories” because they’re thought as mainstream.

How many of the pro-purge advocates actually want to protect the movement or the brand rather than protect their own personal “mainstreamness.” My sense is that most are the latter because of the grandstanding way they tend to advertise their “I’m not one of those types of …” credentials.

If any of my family down in NC were Republicans and Walter Jones were running for the Senate, I’d probably urge them to vote for him.

As it is, my sister and mother live in Jones’ district and I’ve occasionally suggested to them, only half tounge-in-cheek, that they should vote for Jones even though they are both liberal Democrats and I’m a Trotskyist who hasn’t voted for either a Democrat or a Republican in 30 years. That district is still quite conservative and even with the explosive growth of East Carolina University and Greenville over the last three decades, I’m not sure it could send any Democrat to Congress, even in the face of a Tea Partier or a conservative Republican with a neo-con foreign policy. On a peronal level, I’d say that’s too bad because I happen to think my sister would have made a good bourgeois politician if she’d ever wanted to give it a shot, although I, of course, could have never voted for her.

I simply just liked this article. The problem for and conspiracy theories is that there is enough truth to withhold judgement. Merely dismissing them as improbable isn’t enough. There are sincere intelligent people who believe these scenarios.

And with no small number of conspiracies having come to light the grey links to the probable invite polite responses.
———————————————
“I happen to think my sister would have made a good bourgeois politician if she’d ever wanted to give it a shot, although I, of course, could have never voted for her.”

That’s funny.

Plagiarism charges are easy to deal with if tackled head on and corrected.

When a government lies its way into wars, as in Iraq, does it not encourage untenable conspiracy theories? “Truthers” are often obnoxious, accusing anyone who rejects their theories as part of the conspiracy itself.
However if one is to distance oneself from
“hyper-conspiracy” cul de sacs, one should always do so with the acknowledgement of the essential corruption and ineptitude of America’s political leadership-a corruption that might well in certain scenarios attempt to do or wish it could do that which is objectively impossible to do by way of attempting to make nefarious political gain.

The unanswered question is, who are the money men banking on? If they’re not going to fund Brannon, then the whole question is moot, and he will burn out in the Republican primary.

My guess is that Kay Hagen is going to watch while the Republicans duke it out. She may be weak now, but whoever emerges from the GOP primary fight might be weak as well – especially if he is the candidate whom the national GOP financiers are NOT going to support.

In terms of fringe problems, it’s not the plagiarism (as pointed out, many regular politicians have done this). It’s things like repeated plagiarism, and even more, things like neoconfederatism (or plain old confederatism).

Matt:
On the Tillis campaign web site is the following
“Obamacare’s not working. Support repeal & end its $819.3 billion tax burden.”
In the course of the April 22 debate among Republican Senatorial hopefuls all were asked if “climate change is a fact”. All, including Mr. Tillis, answered “no”

I and other Ron Paul delegates from around our state went to Walter Jones to encourage him to make the Senate run this year. I don’t believe enough support was there for him to make a run he knew would be uphill. He is in a serious fight right now to keep the nomination from a Washington lobbyist the War Party is running to try to turn him out of Congress next week.

Optimally we would have Congressman Jones, a Constitutional Conservative with a proven track record of public service, who has made friends by serving constituents from across the political spectrum, as our candidate for the U.S. Senate, and Greg Brannon, who has never held public office, contesting for a seat in Congress. As it is, I’m voting for Brannon, in the hopes that, if he does nothing else, he will be one more vote to turn control of the Republican Caucus in the Senate away from the likes of John McCain and Lindsay Graham and over to “Team Rand Paul”.

The terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy buff” were pushed heavily after a popular American president was gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of a major American city.

These terms were invented in order to discredit the independent researchers who established that the assassination was a CIA black op. A certain ultra-violent faction of American deep politics killed a sitting president principally because he wanted to end the Cold War. The best single book on the JFK topic is probably JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass.

Anybody who seriously looks into the JFK matter knows that the above is the case, i.e. the people tarred as “conspiracy theorists” are simply telling the truth.

Similarly, independent researchers have established that the third building that collapsed in Manhattan without being hit by a plane was destroyed in a controlled demolition with pre-rigged explosives. This means that the other two larger buildings were almost certainly also pre-rigged with explosives, and did not collapse from fires resulting from plane crashes.

And that is still just one piece of an overwhelming body of evidence that the government story about the nineteen hijackers and the religious nut in the cave in Afghanistan, on the basis of which the nation went to war, is false.

Again, the independent researchers tarred as “conspiracy theorists” are simply telling the truth.

In short, the author of the above article is saying that anybody in politics must not only refrain from telling the truth about these deep events, but must vocally dissociate himself from anybody who does the tell the truth about them.

What future does a society have in which being a pathological liar and coward is a requirement for being taken seriously as a political candidate? (Not much, I’m afraid…. )

The problem is not with “Truthers” or “Birchers” or any other groups wanting to latch onto a candidate (which often times is more of a smear than anything else as Debra Medina can attest to.) The problem is the rhetoric candidates like Brannon are using isn’t connecting with the voting public.

I think it was Justin Raimondo who said it best back in 2012 in an article in Chronicles when he wrote many Tea Partiers really don’t have any idea of the implications of their words for policy or for the lives of the people they wish to govern. It’s easy to say such things in the heat of a campaign or the spirit of rebellion against a hated President or in a matter of posture against a hated war or health care policy (which I am and was guilty of as anyone).

But at some point you have to cut to the chase to the way the world actually works and making a fetish of the Constitution is as about as far away from voters concerns as one candidate could possibly be. I would be very reluctant to call a document known as a ‘bundle of compromises,”; put together largely because of the commercial classes fears stemming from the Shays Rebellion and including such noxious clauses as slaves being 3/5th of a person as something divinely inspired. Taken from the point of view of the Founding Fathers, nearly all of what government does today would be considered un-Constitutional. It does not matter because time does not stop nor does politics. The Supreme Court follows the election returns, as the old saying goes, and so do politicians. Find yourself a good lawyer and bingo! Obamacare is constitutional, Social Security is constitutional, abortion is constitutional, farm programs are constitutional, school prayer is not unconstitutional but government prayer is constitutional. You see how this works?

So just like the Bible can be interpreted in any way to fit one’s religious views, the Constitution can be interpreted in such way to fit one’s political views. Thus, talking about the Constitution really doesn’t draw the average voter outside of those who are inclined to believe in original intent or believe in document’s origins in divine inspiration and it’s not a very big group.

So you have to do more and have say more to get voters to open their minds to your outsider candidacy, especially when your opponents have access to millions of dollars and support of the powers that be. Simply knowing more about the Constitution perhaps than the fellow next to you in debate does nothing to impress. As Bill Clinton put it “People don’t give a damn what you know until they know you care about them.”

Care. Love. Compassion. “A conservatism of the heart,” as Pat Buchanan would say. What did Brannon do or say to grab at people’s heartstrings more so than the other candidates? His support for the Second Amendment? Him and everyone else. And that’s voter’s fears, not their hopes or wants.

Someone like Walter Jones seems understand this. He changed his position on the Iraq war because of all the funerals he had to attend for dead Marines and all the letters of condolences to parents and loved ones for a cause that he believe was no longer worth that sacrifice. Voters understood and respected him for it. They don’t see him as a nut or a kook or out of the “mainstream” because he opposes U.S. foreign policy. They see him as man who saw what the carnage in Iraq was doing to people he knew and to his country and said enough. That such wars may well be unconstitutional is part of the argument against them but the main argument has to be one that deals with people’s lives and safety of the country first and foremost. Jones understands this, that’s why he keeps winning.

If you’re going campaign for anything, do so not because you’re tied to some dogma or to the words of some author or some document or the lust of office but do so so that you can be transformed by human experience i.e. the basic meeting you have with the voters. Those of of us who part of the Ron Paul movement from the beginning, did so not because we wanted to create “Galt’s Gulch” (most of us anyway) but to stop a war and stop the damage the war was doing to the nation. Within the words “Ron Paul Revolution” was the word “Love”. Those candidates who come after Ron Paul need to realize this, especially his son. He can certainly play the tactical game of politics but what does he have to say to people beyond the boilerplate which defines a successful Presidential campaign? Right now, I don’t know what that is.